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Posted on 09/05/2005 9:04:34 PM PDT by Frustration
NEW ORLEANS - (KRT) - Ghastly new evidence of Hurricane Katrina's horror emerged Monday night when a sheriff reported the recovery of 22 bodies lashed together around a pole - a desperate, futile attempt to survive the storm.
Sheriff Jack Stephens of St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, said rescuers found the bodies tied with rope and wrapped around a pole in the tiny village of Violet along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River.
The bodies were found soon after the storm in a flooded area of the village but still haven't been identified, he said. He said he believed they had tied themselves together, one by one, so they could escape the rising water.
The report came on a day when rescue crews still sought the living and the dead, and when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin shared a grim estimate of Katrina's human toll - as many as 10,000 people dead, though he didn't cite the basis for that statement.
And more: Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway said he expected the death toll in his Mississippi city to exceed that of Hurricane Camille, which killed 200 people in 1969.
Meanwhile Monday, engineers repaired the ruptured 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans and floodwaters receded a bit as some suburban residents, carrying suitcases and heavy hearts, briefly returned to their homes and sifted through the sodden debris.
Many of those who briefly returned to suburban Jefferson Parish or stayed there throughout the ordeal reported a landscape dotted with bodies.
On Stella Street, Eric Breaux said he saw 15 corpses, most of them caught in barbed wire at the Metairie Country Club. "I don't want to see it again," he said. "I personally tied three dead bodies to street signs."
Authorities permitted residents of the area, a parish just west of New Orleans that includes Metairie and Kenner, to inspect their houses and recover possessions worth removing.
Many neighborhoods still were flooded to the rooftops, but others had dried out, leaving behind an awful, reeking residue. About 460,000 people lived in the suburban parish before the storm, and now some labored on a day that felt like anything but a holiday.
"We have lost everything," Carol Crokem of Kenner said as she surveyed what was left of the home on West Tulane Lane where she and her husband raised three children and two grandchildren.
Maggots gathered at her front door, and sewage and garbage polluted the interior.
In Metaire, Vinson Serio, 59, stacked dining room chairs outside while his wife, Claire, 57, swept malodorous black water from their home. Among the destroyed possessions: his daughter's never worn wedding dress.
"I'm grateful it wasn't death," Serio said. "But it's bad as far as destruction, emotional destruction."
As they and others viewed the wreckage of their houses and their lives - and as the water in and around New Orleans slowly receded, President Bush conducted another partial tour of the region, though he again bypassed New Orleans.
"We're here for the long term," Bush said during a stop in Poplarville, Miss., 45 miles inland but savaged by Katrina. He's been harshly criticized over the federal response.
At the same time, rescue crews continued searching for people still believed trapped throughout the vast region assaulted by Katrina more than a week ago - and for people who chose to stay.
"To our surprise, there are still thousands of people - thousands of people - inside this city who we are trying to identify and relocate," said Warren Riley, deputy chief of New Orleans' police force. "There is absolutely no reason for them to stay. No jobs, no food. ...
"We advise people that this city has been destroyed."
Though there were some exceptions, the large-scale rescues of the weekend seemed nearly over, signifying a shift from finding the living to preparing to recover the dead.
Crews aboard U.S. Navy search-and-rescue helicopters spent much of the morning searching in vain, buzzing the rooftops, floating just above putrid, fuel-stained olive-black waters.
Car and truck roofs remained submerged, and holes in rooftops attested to previously successful rescues.
"You see some of the roofs without holes right next to the ones that have them," said Ren Owens, 26, a Naval rescue officer. "It kind of makes you wonder what's in there or who's in there."
Throughout the day, squads of National Guard troops probed sections of the city, searching for holdouts or the trapped, producing war-like scenes that seemed almost cinematic.
In the city's Garden District, troops formed lines along either side of the oak-lined streets and conducted reconnaissance missions. They found 56 people in a parking garage a few buildings away from their newly commandeered headquarters on St. Charles Avenue.
They picked up 85 more at the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles avenues, where rescue boats dropped off people plucked from flooded houses.
The order for forced removals hadn't yet come, said Maj. David Parker of the Oklahoma National Guard, but if it does, he's prepared. "We'll use sheer force," he said, "or coercion of some type."
Elsewhere, at a spot not yet reached by the patrols, a helicopter fluttered overhead and a woman yelled at it. "Please come down," Jarnette Williams said, waving her arms frantically. "We want to leave."
Riley said at least 400 of his 1,600 officers were unaccounted for, but 4,000 soldiers, National Guard troops and police officers from other cities and states augmented his demoralized police force. He said they were bringing order to a city that had descended into anarchy.
Nagin, the New Orleans mayor, said Sunday night that all uniformed New Orleans officers would be pulled off the streets and sent for evaluation and counseling, but Riley offered no such indication Monday.
"We feel the city is very secure," Riley said, though he reminded everyone of the magnitude of the challenge and the scale of the work that remained. "This was probably the greatest catastrophe in an American city."
Asked for his estimate of the death toll, Nagin told NBC's "Today" program: "It wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000" dead.
During his visit, Bush stopped in Baton Rouge, a city largely untouched by Katrina but now nearly overwhelmed with evacuees. Its population mushroomed from 225,000 to 325,000 within a week, city officials said, and soon could reach 450,000.
Although the federal effort has been widely criticized as slow, insufficient and uncoordinated, Bush was upbeat.
"All levels of the government are doing the best they can," he said during a stop at a shelter at the Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge. "So long as any life is in danger, we've got work to do.
"Where it's not going right," he said "we're going to make it right."
Stung by accusations of racism, given that most of the victims are black and poor, he met with several African-American ministers, but many people remained unconvinced.
"How else can you explain it?" said Ronald Walters, a political science professor and director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. "Look at how the president responded to hurricanes that took place on the other side of Florida in predominantly white populations. ...
"White life has always been more valuable than black life," Walters charged. "That explains it for people."
Bush hasn't responded directly to the allegations.
just horrible.
OMG.
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Note to Prof. R. Williams: White folk didn't shoot at federal relief workers and force them to retreat and wait for armed reinforcements.
It is definitely going to be an unimaginably horrifying sight. Prayers for all who have lost loved ones in this disaster.
Some of the locals have been reovering bodies and tying them to trees so they can be located easily. Note the key quote above embedded later in the article.
I suspect they were tied to the tree after they died.
Hmmm. . .
Exactly. . .
How can I explain it? Easy, Ronald Walters is a racist!!!
You are correct and do we have a troll??????????
What kind of country club is surrounded by barbed wire???
I'm telling you, the black leadership in this country is setting up for another election-year propaganda exercise that will dwarf the previous ones we have seen. By 2008 it will be an article of faith in every black community that the Republicans don't care when black folks get killed and that Republicans murdered thousands of blacks in this hurricane. We can anticipate another 95% Democrat vote in the inner cities. Say hello to President Clinton and Vice President Obama.
My Nephew who works for a branch of the Department Of Homeland Security has just been called up for duty in New Orleans. He fears it may be body recovery duty. They are sending him first to Florida for a weeks worth of training from FEMA, then off to New Orleans.
Body recovery will be a horrible job, but someone has to do it.
To compare the two hurricanes is apples and oranges. Katrina created its own category of disaster. The levee break in NO the next day multiplied the problem exponentially for the people in that city.
The bad news is yet to come.
Yes, and I have the greatest respect for people who do it. It cannot be easy. They will no doubt come across many children.
Not so fast in your assumptions. Some may be converts to conservatism after the outpouring of generosity they are being shown.
HOUSTON (Reuters) - In the last week, Joseph Brant lost his apartment, walked by scores of dead in the streets, traversed pools of toxic water and endured an arduous journey to escape the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in his hometown New Orleans.On Sunday, he was praising the Lord, saying the ordeal was a test that ended up dispelling his lifelong distrust of white people and setting his life on a new course. He said he hitched a ride on Friday in a van driven by a group of white folks.
"Before this whole thing I had a complex about white people; this thing changed me forever," said Brant, 36, a truck driver who, like many of the refugees receiving public assistance in Houston, Texas, is black.
Brant was one of many refugees across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi who gave thought to religion on Sunday, almost a week after the floods changed their lives, perhaps forever.
1) Blacks couldn't seem to elect politicians who would take action to protect their interests.
2) Blacks were the first to descend into lawless chaos, in many cases inhibiting rescue operations.
3) Blacks seem to be prone to surrendering their power to the "nanny state" government, this to their own peril.
4) Blacks have an interest in seeing to it that their lives are valued. They can best do so by seeing to it that the rest of society doesn't view them as lazy, shiftless, blame-throwing, self-absorbed crybabies and criminals.
5) We wait.
"How else can you explain it?" said Ronald Walters, a political science professor and director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. "Look at how the president responded to hurricanes that took place on the other side of Florida in predominantly white populations."
Well, if a professor says it, it must be true.
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